Florida Student's Message In Bottle Washes Up In Ireland

 

There's e-mail , there's snail mail  -  and now there's sail mail.

A father and his son in Ireland discovered a bottle containing a message  written by a Florida high-school student that traveled some 3,720 miles after being tossed into the Atlantic Ocean more than a year ago.

The remarkable journey of the message in a bottle began in a classroom of Melbourne , Fla. , marine science  teacher Ethan Hall, who every year demonstrates the flow of the Gulf Stream by having his students cast bottles into the sea.In  past years , the bottles have followed the current as far north as Rhode Island , but one message in abottle written by  student Corey Swearingen drifted all the way to Ireland.

"I would tease the students that maybe you'll find a nice Irish pen pal or Moroccan date to the prom, but it hadn't happen in four years . So this certainly has been exciting ," Hall told   Florida News.

Swearingen's  message as those written  by his classmates , were dumped from a charter fishing boat into the Gulf Stream about 20 miles off Port Canaveral, Fla. , on Aprill 22, 2009. Over the next 16 months , the green glass bottle - which contained a  message explaing the science experiment and urging anyone who might find it to contact Hall. - drifted across the Altantic before washing up on the shore outside Keating's Pub in Kilbaha , a tiny fishing village in County Clare, Ireland.Thats where 17-year-old Adam Flannery and his father , Stephen, discovered the corked bottle. "Our reaction on finding the bottle was surprise to find it intact , as the beach it was washed up on is a pebble beach," Stephen Flannery told the press in an e-mail . "Then excitement of seeing the message inside the bottle  '08-116' clearly visible."

Flannery wasn't the only  person  excited by the discovery . Sweartingen , who has since graduated high school and now attends  Florida Altantic University in Boca Rato, Fla. , told CNN he was  "excited and amazed" that his bottle had been found . The 18-year -old said he learned something from the experiment. "I learned that the Gulf goes really , really far away."

My take : I  hope we all learned something from the message in the bottle and the Gulf Stream. How we treat our oceans and what we dump in them will eventually end up in other parts of the world ....the BP spill in the Gulf  will affect our  planet for years to come ...people wake up , Global Warming  is here. Planetary climate change is taking place. Let's help  the cause by re-cycling  everything we can, cutting back on energy and fuel consumption, trying to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions and lobbying our government to make sweeping changes to our environmental policy.